Welcome!
Welcome to “My Life in Beer”. This site is a culmination of many years of trying to gather enough time to build and maintain a beer-based website. Now, with a brand new Web hosting vendor, I finally have what I need to put a reasonable site together and maintain it for the long-term. I am retired, at least partially, and that should provide me with the time I need to “do justice” to this site. I am excited to finally be here!
I have been part of the craft beer movement for a very long time. My time as a craft beer drinker, homebrewer, beer blogger, and beer writer dates back to the early 1990s. I will be using this site to begin capturing my continuing beer adventures, whether it’s the craft beers I drink (Beer Experiences), my visits to breweries and other venues I go to for beer (Beer Travel), or the places that I sit down to drink craft beer(s). I hope to leverage all of that beer industry experience for your benefit. I have been in a LOT of bars and breweries seeking the new and, sometimes, unusual beers that our beer industry churns out. Not all of this experience comes from my years spent in my favorite “haunts”… Vermont, Maine, and Florida. For about 10 years, near the end of my working career, I traveled all over the US visiting banks and credit unions in almost every State. Events/dinners with customers, conferences, nights on my own… all of these were perfect opportunities to have a beer (preferably a local beer) from “somewhere else”, wherever that might be.
From 2009-2011, I spent time writing a weekly article for the HopPress Online Magazine. The site was owned by RateBeer.com, a site similar to Untappd, that allowed you to check in and rate beers from all over the world. The HopPress magazine was presented on this same RateBeer site, and so was available worldwide. This all started during the summer of 2008, when I answered an online ad from the RateBeer site that was a call for beer writers to apply to write for their new online beer magazine, called The HopPress. Intrigued, I applied. Untappd didn’t exist yet, and RateBeer dominated the beer check-in market at the time. I’d been using RateBeer.com for a long time and had over 1500 unique beers checked in. I had also just recently published a very early version of the VTHopHead.com website and was posting articles about beer and beer places. As it turns out, they were looking for another writer from the New England area. Once we got started, I published a weekly article on the HopPress site every Saturday morning. It was fun while it lasted, but a combination of things caused it to fail over time. For one thing, we (the 15 or so of us) were not paid as writers for this site. It takes a lot of work each week to develop and research an article before ever writing anything. Writers began to fade as they grew frustrated with working and writing for RateBeer with no pay. The other problem was that the owner and developer of the site wanted to get out of it. He was bored and ready to move on to something else. Lo and behold, Anheuser-Busch stepped up and purchased the site and all rights to it. Eventually, A-B moved away from this check-in service and closed the site in 2025. The HopPress was shuttered many years before the site ended. It was fun while it lasted.
Since 2011, I have been an active member of the Untappd beer app community, checking in all of the unique beers that I have had all over the world. For anyone not familiar with Untappd, it is a Website and a mobile app that allows you to “check in” beers you have had, and rate them as you go, if you prefer. It keeps track of all those checked-in beers and provides statistics about them. Since I joined Untappd on January 9, 2011, I have checked in 3,960+ unique beers of all types, and that number is climbing. You don’t have to like a beer to check it in, “they all count as one”, as the saying goes, and you don’t have to drink the whole beer. However, I have had lots of terrible beers and spent a lot of money in my pursuit to boost the number of unique beers I’d tallied over the years. Because of my love of the beer industry and Untappd, I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a “Moderator” for the administration of the huge Untappd database. I am far from alone in this role, as there are 40+ other folks, from around the world, doing the same thing. It is an interesting job (unpaid), but it’s not a particularly fun job.
This site will be in continuous revision for a while as I catch up on the new site features and functions, as well as the beer-related content that I want you to see here. Please be patient as you browse my site. Also, please send me a note if you find something wrong on the site or if you have something that you think you’d like to see added to the site. Be sure to return frequently to see any new content that I have posted.
Finally, I’d like to introduce you to my new site character, he’s called “Hoppy”. Hoppy will be a common sight here as I add new content to the site… and he’ll accompany us as we explore “My Life in Beer” together!
Cheers!!
Steve K (VTHopHead)
I’m Hoppy!
